Union coalition demands Oakland protect jobs, services

A coalition of Oakland municipal employee unions are calling on city leaders to protect jobs and services in the face of a massive budget deficit.

During a news conference on the steps of Oakland City Hall on Monday morning, labor leaders claimed the city’s current fiscal crisis has been a long time coming.

Oakland IT worker Julian Ware, president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21, said: “Oakland’s deficit is a product of years of mismanagement and a pattern of overspending. This didn’t start today. This didn’t start last year, didn’t start the year before that. It started terms before that.”

The city is currently facing an estimated $115 million one-year budget shortfall that, when added to the money required to restore its emergency reserve fund, will require a total of about $143 million to erase, according to a recent city finance department report.

The unions are proposing a “roadmap to a sustainable budget,” which recommends cutting police overtime by $24 million to $52 million. They’re also calling for staffing up parking enforcement and other revenue-generating departments, reducing “non-service” spending and cutting the growth in senior management’s pay by up to $8 million, among other things.

The proposal will result in $142 million to $204 million in potential new revenue and savings, which would be enough to close the city’s budget gap, according to the union’s report.

Last week, the Oaklandside reported on two city reports, one of which had been inadvertently published online, that outlined the city’s budget shortfall.

It argued that “fecklessness and failure to take dramatic and immediate steps to reduce expenditures will almost certainly result in insolvency.”

The Oaklandside story about the report prompted a series of calls by city officials to the news website demanding a correction.